


The Mending

by theprydonian_archivist



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-25
Updated: 2008-04-25
Packaged: 2018-07-15 01:05:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7199183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprydonian_archivist/pseuds/theprydonian_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor's initiation echoes into the present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mending

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Versaphile, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Prydonian](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Prydonian). Deciding that it needed to have a more long-term home, I began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2016. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact the e-mail address on [The Prydonian collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/theprydonian/profile).

  
**The Mending**

_The gaps I mean,_  
No one has seen them made or heard them made,  
But at spring mending-time we find them there.   


Imagine history as a tangled web in four dimensions, folding back on itself in places, fragile and extensible as gossamer to the lightest touch. Trace any strand of possibility back through radial starbursts of potential and laws spiralling out to shape the cosmos and it will lead to the world-that-was squatting like a spider at the heart of the web, spinning history like silk and without cease. There the snow-capped mountains Solace and Solitude of story and song shone amber under the burnt orange sky. On the rare occasions Silence deigned to be found beside its sisters a great house could be seen upon its peak. The roots of the silence in that house were deeper than the mountain's and neither of the boys ever got to the bottom of it. Zora was a shrewd guesser but never cared to speculate aloud, as if to shed light on the unspoken secrets in which they spent their childhoods entombed would be to offer up the living marrow of her own self to scavengers.

It was Teth and Kash who would murmur in the darkness while the silence slumbered and the dormitory door stood ajar. Even when the lamps lit themselves in the morning and listened like spies Kash would brush his fingers over Teth's temple and touch his mind. He was already more adept at that and more aggressive. They had heard about the spirits they would see when they were taken from the house of silence to look through the door that opened inside you forever. Most terrible of all were the pale dead birds with long beaks of bone, sharp as thorns, ravening. The night before the opening their whispers wove waking nightmares.

'Peck out your tongue, I bet,' said Teth, who couldn't imagine anything worse than having to go on being silent forever and hadn't yet thought of worlds aflame.

'Both of them? They're more likely to fancy an ear each,' said Kash, who couldn't imagine anything worse than not being able to hear Teth whispering to him and hadn't yet thought of being able to hear Teth laugh at him or forgive him. 'Unless you're planning to grow a second tongue along with your second heart.' Among the reasons that this was a low blow was that Teth was indeed a late developer in the heart department and he was deeply sensitive about his maternal heritage.

'I hope they peck out your eyes so I never have to look at you again!' Teth hissed and retreated under the covers to sulk in silence for several seconds.

The following day changed Zora enough to wax lyrical about brain-pecking spirits inspiring her to cast off the shackles of bleeding heart ethics in the pursuit of pure knowledge and begin an ambitious series of dream-theft experiments. For Teth and Kash all transpired as the former had frivolously professed to wish upon the latter. There was no way to tell whether Teth had inadvertently influenced the visionary component of their initiations by planting the unpleasant idea of eye-pecking in their minds. Nonetheless it functioned admirably on a symbolic level; Kash never saw the universe the same way again and Teth only once.

-

A thousand or so years later the Doctor found his way to the other end of the schism. It was on the far side of the continuum from the world-that-was and the door that still opened inside him had never released its pulsing pull on his first heart whenever he had chanced to pass through that sector of the cosmos.

He tightened the remote chameleon arch unit around his head and screamed out to the stormcrows in agony as the vortex unravelled his timeline. Like sharks scenting blood they followed the taste of the years he had lived to the schism and through their eyes he saw the glory of time and space spread out as if he were still standing atop Silence. They were smaller than he remembered but a mere millennium had not blunted the fine ivory of their beaks. They plucked out heart after heart through his ribs as the arch regrew them, searing his skull when it overheated trying to close the wounds. In vain he struggled to reactivate the manual override he had deliberately disabled. The pain was so blinding that he lost count of the hours until the operation was over and a single heartbeat remained.

'A heart in the hand is worth two in the chest,' he remarked with more bravado than he felt and it wilted palpably in his palm as he spat out a mouthful of blood.

The Doctor tore the arch from his head, rubbed his sore temples and braced himself against the blast of the time winds before he staggered into the schism.

He was in a rose garden. Bumblebees drowsed murmuring through the summer sunlight. He knew rationally that like the stormcrows this environment was the way his brain communicated sensory information for which even he had no frame of reference. Still, it was a rose garden. Each rose smelt freshly familiar and one was a shade of blue that stirred up the sediment in the deeps of his memory. Had his younger-older self been here once or had that been somebody else?

A thousand years and galaxies away a little boy cried out. The Doctor started and saw the things reflected in the boy's eyes, a hall of mirrors down the centuries. When the convergence passed he picked a fragrant blue petal and tucked it into one of the secret chambers of his heart before he buried it in the garden.

After a judicious pruning of his memory the Doctor opened his eyes. He would close the schism now and let what he had planted this time come as a surprise.


End file.
